Thanks to you all-knowing, all-seeing movie experts extraordinaire! This is the movie! I also discovered that Warner Bros. Archive has it (or had it) on demand as well as other terrific stuff from 80's television including two unsold pilots from Gene Roddenberry: GENESIS II and PLANET EARTH, and a show I'd long thought I'd never see again, THE MAN FROM ATLANTIS with Patrick Duffy in gills! Ah, memories. Check out this link for more titles.
Okay, I'm trying to find (if it still exists and I don't see why it shouldn't) a made-for-television 'film' done several years ago (more than 20 I think) about a nuclear incident which takes place at the NYC harbor.
(I was wrong - it was Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.)
The thing was shot on tape, on location, to give it a newsy verisimilitude, make it seem as if it were actually happening in the moment and the bulletin had just broken in to your regular nightly viewing. Fascinating and very ahead of its time. I remember being glued to the television set. If you weren't paying attention you might, for a few moments anyway, had thought it was really happening.
The film begins with a bulletin from a young gung-ho reporter who excitedly speaks to us as events unfurl. It seems a group of young anti-nuclear (I think) terrorists, definitely not Middle Eastern (those weren't the times) have somehow gotten their hands on an A-Bomb which they've tucked away on a ship in the harbor. At least that's how I remember it.
They want something or other from the government or they'll blow up part of Manhattan.
Well,there's some tension (as you may imagine) among the terrorists about whether they're actually going to do this - release the bomb, I mean - and then I lose track of the story.
Well, the bomb is set off - I think, accidentally, and the reporter (among many others) is killed and then we have the aftermath and what happens next. Heart-stopping. VERY dramatic especially on video tape.
I sort of remember that the whole thing has a rather bitter deflating ending of the 'get over it and move on' variety so prevalent today.
I surely would like to see this again, but damn if I can remember any more about it.
Any takers? Ring a bell anyone?
Since it's Tuesday, don't forget to check in at Todd Mason's blog, Sweet Freedom, to see what other forgotten or overlooked films, television and/or other audio visuals other bloggers are talking about today. We're an engaging bunch.
Perhaps "Special Bulletin" from 1983.
ReplyDeleteYour thinking, I'm pretty sure, of SPECIAL BULLETIN. It was pretty effective, as I remember it, too...
ReplyDeleteIt sound like it may be SPECIAL BULLETIN (1983) made by the guys who created thirtysomething. Ed Flanders plays the TV anchorman broadcasting the news updates. Other than Roxanne Cash and Roberta Maxwell, two actresses whose TV work I know, I don't recognize any of the other actors' names in the cast. Here are two links for more info about the movie:
ReplyDeleteSpecial Bulletin at imdb.com
Special Bulletin at Wikipedia
Yvette,
ReplyDeleteI couldn't find anything about a bomb in NYC, but I did find this one about a bomb place in a harbor in Charleston, South Carolina. It also uses the special bulletin format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Bulletin
ALL OF YOU ARE CORRECT! Wow. I knew if I threw it out there someone would know. But I never figured EVERYONE would know. Except me, of course. I feel so left out. HA!
ReplyDeleteTHANK YOU guys, you're too much. Really. Charleston, right. NOT NYC. I remember Christopher Allport as the reporter on scene. Now that I glance at the imdb page. Ed Flanders would have been the perfect in studio guy.
Thanks again.
I don't think I ever saw that one, Yvette, but it sounds like an updated version of Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" which caused a real panic when it was (radio) broadcast!
ReplyDeleteYeah, sort of. :) Very effective but no mass hysteria.
DeleteI can remember the title, but not to write "you're"...yes, a number of the folks in SB popped up later in other Zwick/Herskowitz productions, such as the divine ONCE AND AGAIN. David Rasche faced nuclear annihilation again in rather more comic context in the SLEDGE HAMMER! series...
ReplyDeleteI don't know SLEDGE HAMMER, never heard of it. Series? ONCE AND ONCE AGAIN? Please explain.
DeleteSLEDGE HAMMER was an ABC series, a parody of hyper-tough/overconfident cop and agent shows such as MacGYVER and HUNTER, which lasted for two seasons as what ABC could use to draw any audience away from THE COSBY SHOW on Thursdays at 8p ET/PT. David Rasche starred as a cop actually named Sledge Hammer, whose catchphrase was "Trust me...I know what I'm doing" when it was more than obvious that he didn't, but emphatically didn't know that he didn't. It was pretty clever throughout, and didn't wear itself down nearly as much as POLICE SQUAD did through the movie sequence. Stephen Colbert picked up a bit of his gun-lover to the point of anthropomorphizing his gun shtick from Hammer's relation with his gun.
DeleteONCE AND AGAIN was the fourth series Herskowitz and Zwick produced for ABC, after THIRTYSOMETHING, MY SO-CALLED LIFE and RELATIVITY...each better than the last, by me; ONCE AND AGAIN starred Sela Ward and Billy Campbell as divorced parents of teens (though Ward's character's youngest was perhaps ten, and played by Evan Rachel Wood) who fall in love and attempt to deal with the knotty problems of a blended family, with exes, the new loves and bedmates of exes, parents and in-laws and all the other folks in their lives, very much including everyone's business associates (Campbell's character is an architect, Ward's co-owns a bookstore with her sister but that barely can afford to pay the sister, and so goes through a series of jobs). Less soapy than THIRTYSOMETHING much less such latter-day attempts at something similar as PARENTHOOD (or the rather anti-soapy US version of SHAMELESS, which I also like a lot), it remains my favorite series so far, edging the likes of HOMICIDE, THE WIRE, THE GOOD WIFE, BORGEN, BUFFY, JOURNEYMAN, THE PRISONER and all the others for which I've also made a point of seeing every episode.
Zwick and Herskowitz did a web-series after ONCE AND AGAIN was cancelled after its third season, the web series being called quarterlife, which was an interesting and watchable experiment, if less good as drama than all but THIRTYSOMETHING...NBC tried running it during one of the writers' strikes, but didn't promo it well and it did abysmally in the ratings (so NBC burned off the rest of the tv rights they had for it on Bravo). Scroll down here and you'll see my coverage of this for TV GUIDE's website: http://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/quarterlife/292540
DeleteOh, forgot they only have scraps of my writing up for that series, anway...here's a fuller text: http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/search?q=quarterlife
DeleteThanks for the info, Todd. These are all shows I've never seen much less heard of. (Well, you kind of knew that.)Though I am fond of David Rasche and maybe I did see it and just don't remember. At any rate, I do remember THIRTYSOMETHING though I was never a big fan. ONCE AND ONCE AGAIN sounds interesting. Maybe I'll chase down some episodes. I'll be sure and check out your link when I have some time to appreciate it. :)
DeleteYou rate ONCE AND ONCE AGAIN over HOMICIDE? Hard to fathom that one, kiddo.
ONCE AND AGAIN, Yvette (not ONCE twice)...and take a look at the series. In the only three seasons ONCE had, it never had a weak season (such as the season where suddenly HOMICIDE had a single star) nor a very weak episode (the Robin Williams episode). Yes, I was never too bowled over by THIRTYSOMETHING, either...though one character from that series amusingly recurs in ONCE AND AGAIN.
DeleteI must make a confession: I did it all through Googling. I don't think I've ever seen this, but now I'm intrigued to seek it out. This was a rather easy Google search. Wikipedia --believe it or not -- had an entire page devoted to titles of movies that had some kind of nuclear disaster or threat of nuclear disaster in the plot. Just a matter of matching up the brief plot blurbs to what you described above.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's okay, John. At least you knew enough to google it up. It didn't even occur to me. Ha.
DeleteYvette, that plot sounds a bit like that other eighties disaster film called THE DAY AFTER which, as the title suggests, is about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in the US, in Kansas actually. It has some good actors like Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg, and John Lithgow. I remember people queuing up outside theatres to watch the movie more out of curiosity rather than a sense of what could really happen out there during the Cold War.
ReplyDeleteI do remember THE DAY AFTER as a TV movie, Prashant. Very bleak, very frightening. I think they didn't even have many commercials. Jason Robards was terrific, as usual.
DeleteSPECIAL BULLETIN was scruffier than THE DAY AFTER, had less money behind it, but was also less ponderous and more effective. PBS's AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE film TESTAMENT was out at about the same time (perhaps a year or so earlier), and was also more effective in its less-frenetic way than THE DAY AFTER.
DeleteI'll have to check out TESTAMENT, Todd, when I have a moment or two. Thanks.
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